Veterans
by Zoey Overbeck
Summary: AU: It was in the summertime when XANA switched tracks and began a series of random globalized attacks, seemingly in a haphazard response to Team Lyoko's ever-growing threat to its dominion. And then, during a regular mission to deactivate the tower, everything changed. Years later, humanity must regain control of their destiny in one final all-or-nothing bid for freedom.


Dedicated to Medic, for without her help and support, this story couldn't have been written.

I am forever indebted.

* * *

**PROLOGUE  
2013**

It was in the summertime when XANA switched tracks and began a series of random globalized attacks, seemingly in a haphazard response to Team Lyoko's ever-growing threat to its dominion. Some days, it'd simply deactivate electric grids in select countries for a few, short hours, leaving the general public confused and irritated and on others, would send a few specters just to harass the group without doing any permanent damage. Either way, they were little trouble to deal with- not even a single formidable monster showed up in all fights, even if Aelita was virtualized onto the digital planes alone. Suspicions were aroused, and multiple sleepless nights were spent dissecting what the malevolent entity was possibly planning, but nothing apart from cold, dead ends resulted from the countless searches.

Then, as the leaves turned maple-brown and the air slowly filled with the nigh tooth-rotting scent of baking apple pies, everything changed.

"Aelita, I'm detecting an anomaly in the supercomputer."

Said elfin girl paused in her stride, hovering over the desert sector with a rather puzzled expression plastered on her avatar. XANA was as good as dead in terms of the effectiveness of his attacks, and for it to suddenly reappear without warning was unnerving as best. Below her, Ulrich sprang up the hoodoos, bouncing about with his super-sprint like a toddler on caffeine until he landed on the apex of the tallest pillar.

"Status report?"

"The scanner's not showing anything wrong in terms of physical damage to the hardware. I'm running another scan right now for the digital files."

She hummed in agreement, the Rose Spritzer-colored wings lightly fanning the air behind her.

"Aelita, I don't think it's safe for either of you to be in Lyoko right now. I'm calling you two back."

"But what if this is XANA's attack?" she countered, then added, "For all we know, he could be bugging the superscan and giving us a false negative."

"It's too risky. We'll deactivate the tower as soon as Yumi and Odd arrive. …I don't think it's safe with only you and Ulrich there."

Aelita gently floated down and landed next to Ulrich, her wings neatly folding and retracting into her back.

"I hate to break it to you, Princess, but I think Einstein's right."

"…Alright," she concurred. "Bring us in."

"Starting devirtualization in 3… 2… … Huh… that's weird."

The duo exchanged uneasy glances at each other before staring at the sky for an explanation. Over the intercom, the faint clacking of rapidly pushed keystrokes could be heard, occasionally interrupted by a low grumble of disapproval.

"Jeremie?"

The blond glared at the sea of red exclamation-marked and corrupted data filled windows with distaste, willing his discontent to be focused into a pure beam of energy where it would fire from his eyes and burn through the-. He shook his head and blinked rapidly, clearing his brain of the wonderful, lurid vision. His friends were still on Lyoko. His friends needed him. Absentmindedly, a hand toyed with the earpiece and adjusted the microphone.

"I'm getting weird errors for the devirtualization program. Try manually doing it.

"Looks like we're going to have to do it the old fashioned way, Princess," Ulrich sighed, unsheathing one of his blades and aiming it at the pinkette's heart.

"On three," Aelita replied, charging up an energy field in the palm of her hand. "One… two…"

"Three!"

Aelita cried out in agony as the katana horizontally sliced across her right shoulder, through her heart, and out through her left abdomen like a hot knife through butter. Ulrich, on the other hand, had a clean death; the pink ball of energy effectively destroyed his avatar, spraying the environment with a short burst of fading Portal-blue pixels before vanishing.

Jeremie sighed in relief as both cards flashed briefly, the contrast fading and the top beginning to disappear as the devirtualization process began and the scanners powered up. 'Safe for another day,' he thought, running both hands through his matted hair. However, a small beep caught his attention, and he stared, wide-eyed as the color in Aelita's card refused to fade. In fact, her Life Point count stubbornly remained at 100.

"What the…"

On Lyoko, Aelita soothingly massaged the area where the blade had cut, currently in too much pain to think clearly.

"Ow," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Ow ow **OW**."

Her voice ran up and down through several octaves, very much like a musician preparing in advance for an upcoming orchestra.

"Aelita?"

"I'm _fine_," she grunted, pulling her hand away.

She half-expected to see it covered in blood instead of fading blue static, half-expected a simple _reason _to why this was hurting so much. There wasn't. She hissed. That _**hurt**_, and somehow, she was still in the supercomputer despite the German boy's aim being true_._

"Jeremie?"

"Stay where you are. I'll see if I can do anything from my end," he advised, nervously biting his lower lip.

There was a faint grating as the factory elevator ground to a halt behind the blast-proof doors and a pause before a certain brown-haired boy punched in the code and strolled through the opening.

"What's going on?"

"Aelita simply _can't_ be devirtulalized," the blond wondered, quickly scanning her profile for errors.

"What about Code: EARTH?" Ulrich suggested, leaning on the lab chair for support.

"Code: EARTH… that's right! Why didn't I think of that?" Jermeie shouted. "Aelita, hurry up and deactivate the tower, and I'll try Code: EARTH once you're done."

"Roger," she replied, leaping off the hoodoo and combat-rolling onto lower spires until her feet hit the badlands below.

The tower welcomed her, enveloping her body soothingly, like her mother's cool hand on her hot forehead when she was sick with fever. Nothing seemed out of place within it. The individual rings of XANA's eye lit up before her. Placid blue windows of code floated serenely, cobalt 0s and 1s filling the gaps between the sequences.

Putting one trusting foot after another, she let the cylindrical structure tug on her body and pull her upwards. Aelita sighed, letting it take control, and gracefully falling back into a backflip. She straightened up, preparing for the inevitable part where she'd touch down, confidently stride towards the center, and place a firm hand upon the materializing digital panel.

Except… that part never came.

She remained suspended in the invisible fluid, seconds turning into minutes roiling into moments, before everything exploded. The walls expanded, seemingly into infinity. The blue XANA-symbol emblazoned panel dropped out, revealing a gaping maw of dark nothingness.

An alert chirped, impatiently demanding the attention of the attendees. Jeremie yelled in exasperation, slamming his hands down into the armrests.

"Six towers being activated at once? What's going on!?"

"A decoy," Aelita shouted, hoping with all her heart that Jeremie and Ulrich could hear her. "This tower's a decoy!"

Jeremie yelped as thin streaks of electricity raced across the keyboard, biting at his fingers and crackling violently. He sprang away from the offending material, desperately pressing the microphone against his mouth.

"Aelita!? AELITA!"

She couldn't hear him. Her world was static- bustling black and white polyps floated in and out of her vision and an unbearably loud hissing collided with her sensitive ears. Aelita cried out in sheer terror, her desperate shriek shooting up another octave before sharply cutting off into nothingness as a sinister cry rang out. She froze, seeing the dull glint of a well-known bulb in her peripheral vision. Familiar pale blue tentacles that seemingly emerged out of nowhere encircled her waist and suspended her in a state of induced shock. Wide, terrified eyes tracked the other three that were leisurely snaking towards her forehead, as if conscious of what they were doing.

Aelita had a sickly feeling in her gut that it was indeed the truth.

With a herculean effort, she threw her strength into a single limb, hoping to disengage the tenacious predator. Unfortunately, however, all that managed to do was make her right arm twitch and sway a deviatory maximum of an inch from where it rested.

She felt the Scyphozoa upon her now, the cool, smooth texture of the tendrils barely brushing against her forehead. Aelita shuddered in revulsion. How this monster could be the only thing one could feel on Lyoko besides the pain of being shot or cleaved in half was beyond her. Then, as her mind melded with the monster's and XANA's dominating presence became almost overwhelming, she helplessly felt rather than saw, her stature grow slack and relaxed, human clay ready to be molded into whatever shape XANA chose.

She heard whispering; angry whispering in the back of her mind that told her lies and crooned her misinformation, playing on her doubts and feeding on her dreams. She wanted to curl up into a ball and cover her ears with her hands. She desperately wanted them to go away. But still, they came, their voices now gentle and sweet and flattering that it was almost impossible to resist the temptation to listen to them, if only for a second. And all the while, XANA was more or less free to seek whatever he wanted.

"Wouldn't you like a world of your own? A world without danger?" a child's voice, innocent and light, asked, the sound echoing in her mind.

"Y…Yes…" she found herself replying in a rather dreamy voice before snapping out of it, trying yet almost failing to resist the alluring pull.

"Then close your eyes and imagine it," it squeaked excitedly. "Close your eyes and dream of a better world, and it'll come true!"

The elfin girl heard a faint hissing that somehow carried over the cacophony of voices, bringing with it it's single, deadly command. _Shhhh…_

Indeed, even as she denied it, her limbs grew heavy and more unresponsive with every passing second.

To her horror, she felt herself beginning to be pulled away from her body and saw a brief flicker of her predicament in a third-person view, as if she were a wayward phantom merely observing the happenings of the human world. Her vision worsened, darkening at the edges and splitting single objects into multiples. Her mind felt fuzzy and unclear, as if she was being gassed with sevoflurane. Aelita forcibly willed herself to blink rapidly, the three afterimages of the monster snapping back into one, defined shape.

'Minor improvement,' she thought, mentally flinching when the AI disturbed raw, painful memories in its search path.

She squirmed a little. It felt like there was a snake slithering around inside her, only a thousand times worse at minimum. The voices weren't any help, either.

"Successsssss," she heard an oily, ill-used voice whisper excitedly, before something in her mind snapped and would have sent her howling in pain, had she not been held in place by the monster's ability.

In the real world, Jeremie had long since stumbled away from the supercomputer, throwing up the lab chair as a rudimentary shield against the unknown. Lights flickered on and off wildly. Lighting shot out of the machine at regular intervals, threatening to electrocute the stunned duo at any given time. The electrical maelstrom consolidated in the room, where it whirled viciously before seemingly reversing tracks to hang silently, feeding off the holomap's energy.

Ulrich peeked over the headrest cautiously.

"Is it over?"

'_Snrk!'_, the onomatopoeia of the lightning spear that nearly missed his head went.

"Guess not."

The ball hovered in the air for a moment, and then, as if someone poked a hole in a soccer ball, deflated, and expanded outwards with a deafening boom. The blast rocked the factory to its foundations and airblasted the pair into a wall, where they slid into crumpled, defensive curls. Small amounts of rock and sediment rained on the duo as shearing metal groaned all around them. They dared not to move for fear of being struck by a falling beam outside their protected area, even as the ground beneath them seemed to grow wet.

"Jeremie…"

He looked up, ears ringing and glasses knocked askew.

Where the holographic projector was now lay a pool of purplish-colored goop, twisting and swirling to create a vaguely humanoid form from the feet up.

XANA purred as more of its gelatinous mass poured from the scanner and up the ladder into the lab, speaking in a terribly distorted voice. "I must thank you for delivering the keys to my victory to my doorstep. I will make sure to send you a token of my thanks."

The wave of inky purple reared up, and sprang towards the two frozen boys gleefully.

There was simply no time.

Aelita faintly heard what was going on amongst the maelstrom of white noise, feeling quite nauseous despite the laws of Lyoko prohibiting such a sensation.

So did the Scyphozoa, which appeared to look up in a moment of distraction and momentarily paused its influx of XANA-infected programming.

Aelita smiled, charging up an energy field and angling it upwards as much as her bound wrists would allow. This was it. Time for a little prison break.

She fired.

The shot hit the monster's bulbous head dead on. It shook angrily, loosening its grasp a bit more in its pained response. Grinning like a cat that just caught a canary, Aelita steadily wriggled back and forth, using her continually building momentum to catch the trailing end of a tentacle and force her star bracelet to rub against it.

Her wings sprang from her back like a pair of lionesses, completely destroying what little hold the Scyphozoa had on her.

With a triumphant roar, she slipped out of the jellyfish's poisonous grasp, and fell through time and space, her luminescent wings lighting the dark abyss underneath- a welcome change from the monster's invasive probing. Despite the aid her wings gave her, she still found herself tumbling past rushing blue walls of code into

* * *

Soundtracks/songs I listened to during the making of this story are listed in the Spotify playlist (link is located in my profile profile) rather than tacking it on at the end of every chapter. Some songs contain language that is offensive (swearing), but none contain hate lyrics of any sort, whether it is racial in nature or otherwise.

Story will somewhat be written in the style of NOS4A2.


End file.
